Angus King's U.S. Senate campaign is threatening to sue Maine television stations if they keep running a pair of ads from the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

The King campaign said the ads are "false, misleading and deceptive." The campaign mailed the letters to Maine television stations Saturday.

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By Monday night, no decisions from Portland's three stations about whether to pull the ads had been announced.

In one of the ads, people who live near the Record Hill Wind Project in Roxbury blast King for his involvement in the project.

Kathy Sutton of Roxbury said, "There are towers on the ridges. That was about the only factual thing that I could find out of that ad."

Sutton is part of King's new ad defending his record on Record Hill.

King campaign manager Kay Rand said, "We just decided at some point that we needed to respond."

Rand said the NRSC ad has two big problems.

The ad claims king got a sweetheart deal on the project but Rand said, by the time the project was guaranteed federal money, King's company hadn't owned it for months.

She said King didn't make millions on the project -- just $212,000 over five years.

The King campaign is asking television stations to pull the spots.

Rand said, "Broadcast stations airing ads by third-party expenditures have some responsibilities under their license by the FCC."

University of Southern Maine political science professor Ron Schmidt said King's efforts to set the record straight may draw him into the political fray.

Schmidt said, "The danger that they run there, again, is that he'll be sucked into the larger back-and-forth that voters seem to disdain when it happens between democratic and republican candidates which then undermines his claim to be a different kind of candidate altogether."

A spokesman for the NRSC said, in part, "The simple fact is that the ad is accurate and King knows it, and these legal threats are nothing but a desperate PR distraction from that fact."

King himself was not available in Maine on Monday. He was fundraising in New York.